Epicuriosity

Well, after spending all day Sunday in the Cairo hotel I was really worried we weren’t going to make our trip to Luxor. Mark had caught the travelers bug and was in bed ALL day Sunday. Miraculously (and several drugs later) he woke up Monday morning perfectly ready to catch our 6am flight to Luxor. WHEW!

Apparently I had accidentally purchased us business class tickets so it was a nice surprise to have big comfy seats, fresh juice and breakfast on our flight. I don’t think Mark would have done so well that morning in coach. I love how these little mistakes work out like they were meant to be!

We arrive in Luxor and once again, our hotel room isn’t ready so we catch a cab and head to the Luxor Museum. This museum is probably the size of one room in the Cairo museum, but it was so nice, well organized and well labeled that we really enjoyed the artifacts even more. We saw two mummies! One looked all peaceful and one had his mouth open and it was kinda creepy. You could even see the linen in his skull through his eye sockets….ewwww…..and cool!! These mummies are like 3 or 4 thousand years old! And you could see their teeth!

Back to the hotel for lunch and to make our 1pm tour. Our room was ready and since we are Gold members (eh-hem) we were upgraded to a suite! SWEET! Our room had a dining room complete with complimentary cheese tray, fruit tray and bottle of Egyptian wine. Two bathrooms, a jacuzzi tub, a toilet that warmed your butt when you sat on it (seriously and really quite nice). But the best part was our wrap around balcony overlooking the Nile river. Ahhhh,,,, This ended up being a sanctuary for us the last two days as the afternoon sun is just too much after a while.

OK, first stop on our tour…..Karnak Temple! This is the reason I wanted to come to Luxor so bad, Karnak temple is the largest temple complex in all of Egypt. I remember seeing photos of Egyptologists in a room full of columns that were the size of sequoia trees. I’ve always wanted to stand in that hall. As we walked through with our very own egyptologist, Dina, she explained who all the kings and pharohs were, what stories were on their statues and temple walls, what each tomb was used for and how the offering room would have been filled with the scents of perfumes and incense. And then we saw it…the very room I had always dreamed of standing in! We walked in and it was so overwhelming. There is still original paint on the uppermost parts of these columns. Just think….134 columns that would take 6 people stretched arm to arm just to go around one of them. Each column is 50 meters high and they are all covered in heiroglyphs!!! I could go on and on about this temple but would never be able to explain how you feel walking into that room.

Luxor temple was next on the list. This temple used to be completely covered in sand and the town of Luxor was on built on top of it and no one ever even knew until it was discovered. Then they moved the town and excavated. You can see parts of this temple had to be restored, but it was still totally amazing.
As we walked into the temple the call to prayer began over the speakers at the mosques throughout town. It was totally a surreal moment. It’s these little moments that I love so much about our travels. Luxor is about 1.5 miles from Karnak temple and there used to be an avenue of sphinxs connecting the two temples! So throughout the city you can see remains of these sphinx. Very very cool!

Speaking of cool….we were so ready for the hotel by then so off we went to have dinner and relax on our balcony while we watched the sun set over the Nile river. This was a totally unexpected treat, but after the flight, the touring, the heat, the fighting off beggars and being tricked to follow someone to a “market” that ended up being his friend’s shop and the ATM eating Mark’s debit card, we were SO ready for this wonderfully relaxing evening and were so very grateful for our sweet suite! There were two mosques across the Nile and one behind our hotel so as the sun set and the fallucas filled the Nile we could hear the Call to Prayer all around us. No matter what your religion or beliefs, this was a magical, once in a lifetime moment.

Day two in Luxor and Dina and our driver met us at 7am. Off to the Valley of the Kings we went! There are over 60 tombs in this one area. You can’t possibly go in all of them (not on a 4 hour tour anyways) so we hit the three most decorated ones. I’ve heard so many kings and pharoahs names in the past four days I can’t even remember the ones we went in. No photos were allowed so I’m likely to never remember again, but it was still totally amazing. Hieroglyphs and original paintings filled the tombs with stories of the King, offerings made to the Gods and symbols to guide him in the afterlife and help him find his body again. I wonder if the egyptologists left a note when they decided to move it several hundred miles away to a museum? Someone’s going to be pissed! Hehe

We also saw the Colossi of Memnon and the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut. I think this was the first official transvestite! She claimed herself to be a King (and later a God) and dressed in men’s clothing, even wore a fake beard so people would take her seriously as a King.

Can I just say I don’t know what we would have done without our tour guide?! These temples are not marked or explained so we would have just been wandering around looking at all the “pretty pictures” and never really know what the heck we were looking at. Now we can look at a heiroglyph of an offering and tell you how many of each offering the God was receiving. Oh, and that a frog represents 100,000 years (just don’t ask us why a frog)

Time to head back to Cairo, but first I just had to finally tip these Nubian musicians outside our hotel. There were these four men (two playing spike fiddles, a doumbek player and a riqq player). Every time someone entered or left the hotel they would start up their song and they had big smiles. As soon as the person got in their cab or entered the hotel the music just died and their smiles disappeared. But like a wa-wa-waaaaa kind of way. It was SOOO funny to us. Whenever we were in the lobby you could hear them start and then stop, start and then stop. They never even finished the song. We began to wonder if they even knew the end of the song because nobody every tipped them or stayed long enough to watch so they ended up playing the same first four measures and then died out. HAHAHA (ok, you just had to be there). But, as we got in the cab headed to the airport I reached in my pocket and had 10 pounds. I looked over at them and they had already stood up, big smiles on their faces and by this time had already gotten further in the song than we had heard in two days. I handed one of them the 10 pounds. Their smiles got bigger, their instruments played louder and they began to sing, “Bye, bye, bye…lalala….bye bye bye!”

We ended the evening eating mezzas with beladi bread being made by two women in front of a fire, a veggie fatir and a dessert fatir covered in almonds, raisins, honey and powdered sugar. YUM!!

So it’s 1:30am (still not on Egypt time yet) and I’m ready for a day of shopping in Cario! We’ve gotta get our sleep and be ready for some haggling tomorrow!